Alive Women Are Selfish

Dear Community,

My family was away this weekend, and for the first time in fifteen years, I had the house entirely to myself for two full days. I felt excited and curious about what might unfold, and a little scared, too. Sleeping alone in an empty house has never been easy for me.

Saturday morning, after a walk and a very slow breakfast, I found myself in a place of confusion. (I am not even sure why I eat so quickly most of the time. I suspect it is a habit I developed when my children were little, when I felt perpetually on call, responsible for responding to every discomfort, every need, every crisis. Somewhere along the way, I stopped allowing myself to sit down, slow down, and simply enjoy my meals.)

There were so many things to be done: cleaning, decluttering, unfinished projects, open loops everywhere. Yet I felt tired.

After much debate with myself, I decided that since I felt tired, I would take a nap. I took a nap and woke up even more tired. At this point, another nap was out of question, because who does that? Who wakes up from a nap to go directly into another nap? And who wastes a beautiful day full of sun and glory, in bed? After a few more minutes of intense internal debate and name calling (”lazy”), I decided that since I still felt tired, I would like to take another nap. So I did.

Cluttered closets kept calling me like the sirens calling Ulysses. I decided to cover my ears and instead of listening to the siren’s songs, to listen to my own internal voice.

I’m not going to lie. It was hard.

Slowly, after much time napping, eating ice cream and generally just listening to a whole cacophony of internal voices that were for sure not mine (on top of the siren’s voices), I was able to distinguish my own.

What I truly wanted was to go to the movies. I wanted to take a microdose and see the most recent Steven Spielberg movie “Disclosure Day”, that coincidentally came out during U.S.A.’s government Disclosure Month.

So I did that. I bought a ticket. I blessed the “Genius” strain of the mushroom that I hoped would bring me closer to my truth.

And suddenly, an internal alarm went off.

Loud. Impossible to ignore.

“Unauthorized use of resources! Stop now!”

Whose voice was this? What? Was I not allowed to go to the movies?

As I listened more carefully, I realized there was a part of me that didn’t believe that my life force belonged to me. It belonged to my family, my children, my patients, strangers who look they might need help, virtually everyone except me.

The voice kept going: “Going to the movies? Frivolous. Wasteful. It serves no one but yourself. Who cares that it’s making you feel more alive and happy? You are being selfish so stop it.”

Its message, when distilled to its essence was simple: “Make yourself useful. If you’re useful, you will be praised. If you’re happy and alive, you will be called selfish”.

I was stunned. And usually when I feel this level of surprise, I start talking out loud to myself. I could hardly believe the scale of the energy theft happening in real time. And worse: no one was doing it to me! I was doing this to myself! I was obeying a story so old and so familiar that I had no conscious awareness of it.

How long had this narrative been directing my life?

So I left a message for my friend Joanna Reed, the beautiful Artist & Author of E M E R G E N C E Oracle Deck, because this felt like such a profound revelation. It seemed like a natural continuation of a conversation we’ve been having ever since we met a few months ago through one of the artist groups I belong to.

I told her that I am finally cutting the cord to the voice that has been stealing my energy for decades, the one that tells me I only have value when I am in service to others.

I told her I am ready to release the judgments and beliefs that have been draining my vitality. How did I end up in a place where I don’t even believe my energy belongs to me? Where I assume everyone else has a greater claim to it than I do? What kind of dream, or nightmare, was I living in that I failed to take full ownership of my being, my energy, and my life?

As she often does, Joanna responded thoughtfully. Speaking as someone who has walked this path herself, she shared a practice she learned from her sister, mentor, coach, and Akashic Records reader, Seana Zelazo, author of The Way of Innana (https://www.seanazelazo.com/book). She explained that simply cutting energetic cords is often not enough. The first step is to pull the cords out by the roots and fully extract them.

If you’ve read this far and would like to learn the rest of the process, reach out. I’d be happy to share it with those who feel genuinely called to the practice.

I ended up enjoying the movie very much. I wept throughout its two hours and twenty-six minutes and, somehow, it freed up a huge amount of energy. The next day, I spent the entire day decluttering and making my space a little more aligned with who I really want to be.

On this beautiful Monday morning, I will leave you with this question (and I know that this will resonate with a lot of my readers who identify as women):

If your life belonged primarily to yourself (and not to other people), what would

you want more of?

Please let me know.

With love, (a tiny sprinkle of) rage, and reverence,

Your disorganized, recovering people-pleaser, community-dreamer, hope-filled activist in the making, deep-sleeper, clean compliment giver and receiver, not-a-true-exhibitionist, 21-day resetter, recovering prostitute, courageous by practice, trusting by skill, always with my head in the clouds, but loving my feet on the ground, soul worker (!), inner voice listener,

Corina